Although Indian English is the best-documented South Asian English, its diachronic development has not been described to a great extent. The present study begins address this gap by offering real-time perspective on evolution of modals and semi-modals in English. It sketches changes frequency three corpora newspaper texts from 1939, 1968, early 2000s. Changes eleven are found be similar trends ...

Modal verbs have different interpretations depending on their context. Previous approaches to modal sense classification achieve relatively high performance using shallow lexical and syntactic features. In this work we uncover the difficulty of particular modal sense distinctions by eliminating both distributional bias and sparsity of existing small-scale annotated corpora used in prior work. W...

Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanesespeaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had pic...

English-learning children have been shown to reliably use cues from argument structure in learning verbs. However, languages pair overtly expressed arguments with verbs to varying extents, raising the question of whether children learning all languages expect the same, universal mapping between arguments and relational roles. Three experiments examined this question by asking how strongly early...